Peeping

The creak of the mattress in her parents’ room was not sex: it was theft. Barefoot, Sabina followed it down the hall and pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

I thought it would be a fifteen-minute scolding. I didn’t count on the bag Bárbara brought, or on the woman that furious mother would become.

I closed my eyes to imagine him watching me. When hands grabbed my waist from behind, I thought I knew whose they were. I was completely wrong.

She wore a tiny black bikini, two triangles tied with strings, and looked at me over her shoulder as if she already knew what was about to happen between us.

I cornered her against the oak door without imagining that, through the crack in the drawing room, a pair of green eyes could no longer look away from us.

I thought the whole house was mine that night. Then the lock turned, he looked at me from the doorway, and I was still naked on the sofa.

I walked barefoot down the hallway thinking I’d find a movie. What I saw behind that half-open door changed everything between the three of us.

When Greta opened the bathroom door and found us like that, I knew the lockdown was only just beginning to drag all our secrets into the light.

I built the pool for the family, not for this: so my son’s girlfriend would spy on me from the window while I pretended not to notice her trembling hands.

She stood still against the mirror, breathing through her nose, letting me do as I pleased in silence while the rest of the building rode up without suspecting a thing.

I crossed half of Spain with a fever to take shelter at my grandmother’s house. I never imagined that country woman would look at me naked the way she did that first night.

The silence at the table said it all before the words did: my father had a debt, and this time it wouldn’t be paid with money.

Hidden among the trees, they heard them gasping, and back at the table the woman whispered an idea to her son that he never imagined he’d dare to carry out.

It was my daughter’s wedding, but it was him I looked for in the crowd. A ballad, the sand under our feet, and suddenly he was no longer just my son.

The first thing I remember from that summer is the counselor’s cracked hands and the girl with the fringe’s eyes. The last, what I saw among the trees before dawn.

The key had been warming my pocket since the night before. I knew she’d be awake, waiting for me, with her robe open and the coffee pot on the heat.

Two hours before the vows, I tried to steal one last kiss from my fiancé and crossed the forest to his cabin. The back window showed me something I’d never forget.

I’d spent my whole life seeing her in heels and stockings, but until that night on the sofa I’d never imagined what her feet could make me feel.

It was three in the morning when I heard the key in the lock. I hid behind the curtain, never imagining what my mother would let them do a meter away from me.

He came to my room to confront me about what happened on Saturday, but what he confessed afterward left me breathless: he had seen everything, and he liked it.